TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION C. 8G1 



but he now claimed that ' the xclxole Cotteswold Range had ceased to be dry land 

 at the time the Clays and Northern Drifts passed over it.' AVe perceive from this 

 passage that Mr. Lucy was a 'submerger,' and in this respect differed from CroU, 

 who most probably would have attributed the phenomena to the action of his great 

 ice-lobe traversing the South of England. 



The question which more immediately concerns us relates to the value of the 

 evidence which would require either a glacier or a ' great submergence ' to account 

 for these things. The alleged phenomena are in many cases capable of other 

 interpretatiocs. We have the authority of Mr. Etheridge that little or no true 

 Boulder-clay occurs in the Cotteswold area.' On the other hand, the distribution 

 of much of the ei'ratic gravel is probably due to agencies of earth-sculpture long 

 anterior to the great Ice Age. There remains one special piece of evidence 

 adduced by Mr. Lucy in favour of his contention, and this he considered of so 

 much importance that it formed the principal part of the subject of his annual 

 address to the Field Club on quitting the chair in 1893.- 



He there referred more especially to the discovery in the Inferior Oolite, on 

 Cleeve Cloud, of quartzose sand and of a boulder of a similar character to some 

 described in his previous papers. The sand and the boulder, he says, belong to 

 the period of the great submergence. Similar sand also appears in several places 

 on the hillside. He had previously recorded boulders of Carboniferous Limestone, 

 Millstone Grit, &c., in the Northern Cotteswolds, but not at so great an elevation. 

 He further proceeds to account for the absence of striae, and of the fact that the 

 Cotteswold rocks are not motitonnep, on the supposition that the soft oolites would 

 not retain striation, but would be crushed by pressure. Consequently, he claims 

 the top of Cleeve Cloud as a fine example of ' glacial denudation,' whatever that 

 may mean. The boulder from Cleeve Cloud is now in the Gloucester Museum, 

 and might well become a bone of contention between the submerger and the 

 glacialist as to how it got into its elevated position of over 1,000 feet. Fortunately 

 there is a third explanation, which, if it be correct, shows how dangerous it is to 

 build theories, a.s well as houses, upon sand. Other distinguished members of the 

 Cotteswold Club are of opinion that the whitish sands on Cleeve Common belong 

 to the ' Harford Sands,' which constitute an integral part of the Inferior Oolite 

 itself. There may be some diflerence of opinion as to the concretionary nature of 

 the boulders, though these may well be nothing more than the ' doggers,' or 'pot- 

 lids,' so characteristic of calcareous sandstones. Mr. Winwood believes that 

 ' the so-called foreign boulder' in the Gloucester Museum evidently came from the 

 * Harford Sands.' 



So far, therefore, the evidences of glacial action in the Cotteswolds do not rest 

 on a very sure foundation. Yet the Severn Valley separates that range from an 

 area on the west, where there are clear evidences of local glaciation, as described 

 in the ' Annual Report of the Geological Survey for 1896.' Portions of this 

 material find their way into the river bed and elsewhere as Drift which has most 

 probably been rearranged — hence the so-called Boulder-clay and Drift in the bed 

 of the Severn. Once more, then, in the cycle of geological time we perceive that 

 our di.strict lies on the confines of two distinct sets of phenomena. West of the 

 Severn and north of the Bristol Channel the evidences of considerable local 

 glaciation are obvious, whilst this can hardly be said of the Cotteswolds, the 

 Mendips, or the Quantocks. 



To the more recent geological history of our district it will be sufficient to 

 allude in the briefest terms, when I remind you of the paper by Mr. Strahan on 

 the deposits at Barry Dock, and the still later one by Mr. Codrington on the sub- 

 merged rock valleys in South Wales, Devon, and Cornwall. Here we have impor- 

 tant testimony to certain moderate changes of level which have taken place, and a 

 picture is presented to us of the Bristol Channel as a low-lying land surface, with 

 streams meandering through it. Thus a depression of something like 60 feet 

 appears to be the most recent change which the geologist has to record in the 

 estuarj- of the Severn . 



' rroc. Cottes. Xat. Club, vol. xi. (1893), p. 83. 

 2 A'ol. cit. p. 1. 



